This is certainly an interesting case study in the pitfalls of behavioral design, but one important detail that the story glosses over is how rare these incidents are:
More than two dozen people [have been] killed by carbon monoxide nationwide since 2006 after a keyless-ignition vehicle was inadvertently left running in a garage.
On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
"Dozens of others have been injured, some left with brain damage."
So deaths are not the whole story.
While one is certainly far more likely to die in a automobile collision, of heart disease, or cancer, I don't think it helps anyone to ignore the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Incidentally, other sources of carbon monoxide can also exist in the home, so it's a good idea to have a carbon monoxide detector there. Perhaps cars too can be outfitted with them.
You make a reasonable point, and I don't mean to trivialize a serious issue -- carbon monoxide poisoning caused by keyless cars -- but in comparison, bathtub drownings are far more common: about 335 a year.[1]
Ok, but what’s the ‘deep enough water to drown in’ usage rate of bathtubs compared to usage of keyless entry cars by their owners? These days bathtubs seem to be inconvenient showers...
Yeah, but the anti skid pad in my bathtub (which might prevent drownings) is slippery when damp, so I fell in the bath while taking a shower, and could have been killed.
I guess that sort of death goes under the “drowning” category, since the bath mitigation can kill shower-takers.
In my shower/tub combo, I sometimes accidentally plug the drain by bumping the attached drain cover with my foot, causing it to slightly turn and fall into place. This could easily happen if I fell.
Sometimes I have a slow drain and I don't fix the until it becomes slow enough to fill up substantially during my shower. If I were unconscious in the sub with the shower running, it could have enough time to fill up. This would be especially true if my fall caused the water to switch to tub mode, which sends a lot more water into the tub.
I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
That was very informative, decent reasons not to let your drain maintenance get out of hand, or leave the stopper next to the drain.
> I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
Jesus Christ, I wouldn't know about college, but that seem crazy. I hope your friend got the help he needed.
If you're considering bathtub usage, you'd also have to consider how many people park their cars in enclosed garages and how many of these cars lack safety features to prevent you from leaving it on.
Unfortunately this will have to entries into the Darwin awards. If you are careless enough not to double check, there are consequences. I drive an electric car, so this will never happen, I however always make sure everything is locked, all lights are off, and plugin every night.
Nice to be so perfect (or is it overchecking via OCD?) to never have forgotten your keys/specs/coat, ever left a light on or been distracted by an interruption.
The Darwin award implies people "eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner". I don't think that doing what you were doing for years without any danger is now considered idiocy.
It's like in 40 years a toaster or an oven keeps running if you don't disable it through your "home controlling mental device" and burn your house to the ground while you are sleeping. Oh, and you cannot opt-out of the "mental device", you have to use it like it or not.
Old people have the mental muscle to think "I have the car keys with me, therefore the engine is off" built after decades. It's a serious design flaw to not offer at least an opt-out for these people (like key not IN the car, engine shuts off).
I'm surprised this is even allowed, in the UK it is illegal to leave a car unoccupied on a public road with the engine running. Obviously we're talking about private garages in this case, but the technical ability to have the car running with nobody in it seems to run counter to the spirit of the law.
As far as I'm aware, cars are modified for the UK market and they're not allowed to do this - I think normally a start/stop button is added and an alarm goes off if you get out of the car with it running.
Where I live, the temperature regularly goes well below 0F every winter. If I start my car and get into it right away, it will be at least 10 minutes before it becomes noticeably warmer.
In colder climates (e.g., further North in this State), people may leave diesel vehicles idling for hours while at work, etc., because it can be so difficult to restart them outdoors in the cold.
There's a reason people start their cars and leave them running for a while.
A friend of mine owns a Tesla but on more than one occasion has left the engine running when he has borrowed his partner's car or had a hire car. It's amazing how quickly one gets out of the habit.
> On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
The deaths and injuries are utterly avoidable with decent design. Also, this is a feature that isn't prominent yet. The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
> The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off. This seems like a grossly over-complicated (and failure prone) solution in comparison to just using a key for the ignition instead. If you can do something easily with a strictly mechanical simple solution, why reinvent the wheel?
> I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off.
If you say so. I'm pretty sure just turning the car off if there's nobody sitting in any of the seats and the key is not in the car would be a good start.
If you live in a cold climate, you often have to let your car idle for a few minutes to heat it up, or your windows will be all foggy and you don’t see a thing.
It's also really hard on the motor if the fluids are cold, as you're more likely to induce wear because of boundary lubrication and similar effects. Additionally, like on my truck, the synchronizers on the transmission are really cranky when they're cold, and it's hard to get it moving without warming up a little bit.
> Have you never turned your car on before you left to heat up the passenger compartment?
With the remote start system I have a passing familiarity with, if you remotely start the car and warm it up with no person and no key in the car, the car automatically shuts off fifteen minutes after it has started if someone doesn't get in with a key. Seems to be compatible the simple guidelines I mentioned.
"Key not in the car" should be condition enough. I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where you NEED to have the key away from the car while the engine is running.
That would lead to far more accidents where people leave kids or animals alone in a car in direct sunlight, assuming the AC will keep them cool. But as they step away from the vehicle, the engine and AC turn off, leaving anyone in the car to die from heat stroke.
Those people don't need to take the car key with them, but with a keyless car you don't think about the key (that's the entire point of keyless cars). The key is just one of many things in your pockets.
Isn't keeping a car running with children inside incredibly dangerous? What if they release the breaks or shift to drive? I'd think taking the child with you should be safer than leaving them in a running car.
For animals that's different of course. But wouldn't an override be enough?
When I was a kid, I was at my babysitter's house waiting to be picked up by my parents. Another kid's parent showed up, parked her car, and put one of her kids in the front seat. Her other kid ran in the house, and she ran after him. The first kid let the e-brake off, and the car went rolling down the driveway and hit a tree. It didn't roll very fast, so there was no damage and nobody was hurt. But the mom was freaked out as she came back out 10 seconds later and saw the car rolling away...
This was in the late 80s. The car wasn't running. It was a mechanical e-brake. I know a lot of cars have electronic parking brakes now, but most probably still don't.
On another note, I can't think of a single car that will let you take it out of Park without a foot on the brake, or without using an override.
My car key's battery suddenly gives out mid-drive once and I had to listen to a warning tone every few minutes but at least it got me home. It would be incredibly frustrating if the car just decided that it doesn't see the key and shuts it off.
It also breaks the backup mechanism for no-battery situation where you can tap the fob on where the ignition lock would be for key cars to start it up.
Even simpler. If two of three conditions are met, switch engine off:
* Rising Carbonmonoxide levels
* No weight on driver seat for 3 minutes
* No driving activity for 3 minutes
The first factor alone should already prompt a shutdown though. It wouldn't even matter if the key was in the car, that might happen by accident and isn't a terribly good indicator.
I don't think this is actually simpler. I was deliberately trying to give an example that didn't require any new sensor tech. I don't think the cars have monoxide detectors right now.
Determining whether anybody is in the car doesn't sound trivial beyond the driver seat. The seatbelt warnings are triggered by weight, but people frequently store stuff on their seats, and occasionally that stuff has a weight plausible for a human
Why not just start an alarm 10 seconds after the key is out of range? Or automatically shut off the engine if the key has been out of range for more than 5 minutes. That still prevents accidents while driving (there were cases where children threw keys out of the window) but should be safe otherwise. And programming that timer shouldn't be a lot of work. The detection already exists anyway.
The cars need to work when the key battery is dead. My LEAF has an inductive charger near the start button that allows you to "charge" the key just enough to do the security exchange and then start it.
It's quite possible, even likely, that more than 2 people per year would die from environmental exposure if we programmed cars to not work if the key battery dies (as a proxy for "key out of range"). (Drive out to a deserted location, shut down, enjoy the day, get back in to find a dead car key battery. You want to be able to get home rather than stay at the trailhead.)
An alarm would still be fine though? Maybe with an option to deactivate it. I'd want to know when the key gets removed from the car, not having any notification appears wrong.
My car displays something on the screen, but I don't recall it making a noise.
I've left the car running while stepping into a store because someone was in the passenger seat. If I get too far, my bluetooth music stops, but the air-conditioning keeps going without the key.
Keyless cars are a tiny fraction of overall vehicles.
The net befit is also minimal, so if they became popular you would expect a ~hundred deaths per year for what? Do save 20$ per car because they lack CO detectors?
It would be easy enough to only use the CO detector when the car is in park or the emergency brake is on. That way it could never activate while driving.
For modern cars, I think that's what's happening actually - engines will power off when stationary and not in gear, but the car is still on and the engine will restart when it's running low on battery power. Thus, people leaving their car in the garage thinking it's off.
If the engine’s off because of stop/start the warning noise should already be much louder and accompanied by dashboard warnings. See also what happens when you leave the lights on.
That’s what doesn’t make a lot of sense here before we dash off to design some sort of countermeasure - there’s either an engine running (and “modern” engines aren’t that quiet, especially in a confined space), or there should be some loud visual/auditory warning. I guess it’s possible the victims didn’t hear either?
The right question to ask is how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The difference amounts to the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders.
A dozen people is a dozen people too many.
Stopping the engine when exiting the car with a fob should be the default, as it is consistent with the old, physical key behavior - and will prevent someone from driving off with your car while you have the key (as happened to someone in the thread).
> ...how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The great thing about the free market is that information spurs innovation. News stories like these make consumers aware of risks they couldn't recognize before. Now we, as informed buyers, can seek out these safety features in the products we buy.
Yeah, no. Humans are awful at estimating any low-probability event. That's why seatbelts and air bags took so long to catch on, despite being positive changes.
Well, in fairness, another big factor in the case of air bags for sure, and seat belts to an extent, is that the auto companies fought them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970118).
It seems that the humans in this thread are equally bad at it, considering the clamor for government force over an infinitesimally small number of admittedly tragic events.
But it's not "stop killing people" vs. "keep killing people". It's is this improvement a higher priority than any of the other changes that would also save lives?
The bottom line calculation should be total $ / death prevented. And then compare that to any of the myriad other changes or improvements possible. Like the early warning crash systems (more expensive, but probably more lives saved). Or more airbags. Or backup cameras (to prevent people getting run over). Or drowsy/alertness sensors. Or more $$ for self-driving tech that could take over if a driver becomes incapacitated (long shot and long-term but huge payoff).
One other point on the auto-shutoff is that this could lead to the deaths of children in overheated cars where the parents had no clue the car would turn off by itself. The car should either turn off immediately or not at all, imo.
Finally, why not install CO detectors on the cars and shutoff the car then? It couldn't be too sensitive, but surely could tell the difference between an enclosed space and bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent with the old physical key behavior. One had to actually turn the car off. I'm not sure how that is different today. Before you removed the key, nor you press a button. But you still had to take an action. It wasn't automatic
Maybe it’s just because I’m used to physical keys but the reflex seems different. I’ve caught myself forgetting to turn off rentals that don’t have a physical key. But I’m open to chalking it up to different habits.
Yeah you can, but while the door is open, the car will (in my experience with 4 different brands of keyless cars in Europe) sound an alarm to remind you it is still running.
>Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent ...
Attention to details: stopping the engine when one exits the car with the fob is consistent with what happens when you exit the car with the key you used to start it.
Before, you had to remove the key.
Now, you have to remove the keyfob and press the off button.
> the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders
Ah, but that's not quite how it works, either. There is a certain, small risk involved with being in the world, we can't offload responsibility for any small accident on to the shoulders of manufacturers. Yes, if you can show negligence, there's a case to be made, but you can't.
The ratio to study is not how many deaths per vehicles, but cost-of-implemenation per vehicle vs deaths. The article mentions that the feature can be implemented "for pennies per vehicle." If you could save 1 person's father for $.01 per car, why not?
You could surely prevent this purely in software. The car knows that is hasn't moved, nobody is sitting in the driver's seat and nobody has touched any controls for 10 minutes. Surely it can switch itself off?
Could be a special switch on the fob for that. Could beep every five minutes to remind you. Lots of ways to handle it that would save lives at the cost of only minimal inconvenience.
How is beeping every five minutes any different than what cars do currently? Cars with push to start are already required to beep when the key is taken out of the car.
If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
Should we require special bathtub sensors that beep when they detects still water because hundreds of people drown in bathtubs each year?
The pennies per vehicle line confuses me, honestly. Building it in to a car should cost zero cents, since it's just a config change, and apparently a retrofit is in the realm of $5. Where do pennies come in?
A config changes requires someone to design the configuration, right? That's at least x hours of coding, testing, and final validation. Nothing is 'free'.
Some more math, adding a 1 cent component (not counting one time costs of R&D and tooling) to every new car sold in the u.s. (~17.5 million) would equal out to 175,000; which equates to a spending of $87500 per death prevented, a reasonable amount.
On a counterpoint, 15 times more people die from lightning strikes per year than this, so are kinda going after extreme edge cases here
>a software change that it said could be accomplished for pennies per vehicle. In the face of auto industry opposition, the agency let the plan languish, though it says a rule is still under consideration.
Why the car industry would oppose such a minor fix is beyond me. If it does not even hurt the bottom line, why not make that change.
Many reasons why they’d oppose. Making it automatic means you become liable when it doesn’t work. Software has bugs. Adding it to older cars means you have to admit your cars aren’t safe and that’s hard plus recalls are annoying to deal with. People are fed up with all the beeping in modern cars and are becoming alarm deaf.
I'd think some drivers prefer the current behavior. Like if you don't have a garage and live somewhere with cold winters you probably want to be able to start it and walk away.
Sure, but 30 mins is more than enough time to warm up in situations where externally powered heaters aren't required. Surely there must be some safe ground that would not drastically affect most drivers, but still save lives
Yeah, that's fair. I drive a manual car, which makes it very hard to absent-mindedly leave your car running (at least if you park it in gear, but I think most people do).
I have a 2010 Prius with keyless entry and start. If the car is on and you close any door without the key in the vehicle it will make a loud audible beeping noise. It means if you jump out to get something from the trunk, it first starts beeping when the drivers door is closed and again when the trunk is closed. Pretty hard to miss.
If you try and lock the car while it is on (using the keyless entry), it will just produce a continuous audible noise and won’t lock - again pretty hard to miss. The same thing happens if you try and lock a key in the vehicle.
That is a good thing since some newer Fords leak CO into the interior. I'm sure they wouldn't have added it if they could've gotten away with doing nothing.
This is a good feature. At work we used to get emails about people leaving their lights on, now we get emails about people who left their car running (!) in the garage. Combination of keyless start and quiet engines is the culprit.
I've forgotten to leave with the keys, several times. Not so bad at work, which is in an office lot in suburban sleepytown, but kind of scary when I get back from paying a social call in a higher-petty-crime area like the Mission district.
35,000 people are being killed in the US every year by cars, but now suddenly it's "Deadly Convenience," now that 2 people a year are dying from CO poisoning?
any time human lives are involved it's worth moderating one's outrage at such distortions, but the point you make is worthy of consideration: the number of deaths per year (21 in some unspecified time period is quoted in the article) seems to be relatively small compared to other addressable hazards.
the number of deaths and injuries per year from carbon monoxide poisoning by car is roughly on par with lightning strikes. we address that particular danger with a relatively straightforward technology, the lightning rod.
so i'd expect the response here would be of similar magnitude (rather than some convoluted rube goldbergian contraption). the auto-shutoff mechanism seems to fit the bill and some cars are already fitted with it.
so all in all, it's worth being aware of this danger and the solution, but not worth spending much more time thinking about it. it's much more fruitful to focus on reducing one's heart disease vectors, cancer risks and distracted driving.
If lightning strikes would really only kill two people a year and not cause property damage, we should not be adding lightning rods to buildings. That's probably fewer than the number of people who die while fitting lightning rods.
This. LIghtning rods are a very cheap insurance policy against the enormous property damage that lightning does to your building (think fire + widespread electrical damage).
Looks like, in the last 10 years in the US, lightning has claimed less than 50 lives per year [0]. I'm not sure how that would compare to carbon monoxide deaths from cars when making the proper adjustments, but I suspect lightning is a bigger threat. The male to female ratio (221 to 62) is interesting, and I suspect that it's because males tend to work outside more than females (anedoctal).
You can't just "not use cars". No matter what you need some form of transportation, and people will die on it.
Any time someone says a huge class of deaths is totally avoidable, take it with a mountain of salt. It's a useless idea, completely disconnected from the useful realm of risk management.
But in order to decrease our reliance on cars, we would have to let builders replace the single-family housing in cities with taller multi-unit buildings. This would:
- Be very profitable for people we don't like.
- Employ carpenters building prefab housing in Maine rather than carpenters who live in the city.
- Fail to destroy capitalism.
- Destroy the character of the neighbourhood by casting shadows.
- Let the wrong sort of people into people's neighbourhoods.
We live in the sort of weird world where people would rather look into ways of stopping those people dying from CO poisoning than snarkily dismiss their deaths as statistically irrelevant.
Pretty much all of those 35000 deaths involve mistakes, faults or cases of pure bad luck whose individual contribution to fatalities is comparatively small; pretty much all of them get investigated to see what went wrong and whether it's something that's likely to be repeated or something which can be avoided in future without disproportionate cost.
Your comment is the snarky one, and you attempt to dismiss 35,000 deaths rather than 2. In every single one of those 35,000 cases, someone decided to drive that day, on purpose. You almost got it right: In this crazy wacky weird world we live in, people would rather talk about 2 CO deaths caused by some dumbshit accessory nobody needs, than the 35,000 caused by their own complicity and laziness. Nobody asked whether those deaths were intentional, but you answered anyway, so that's interesting.
Way to totally disregard my point that pretty much all the 35000 deaths consisted of one or two individual deaths, some of which see junctions redesigned or products recalled as a result without anybody haughtily dismissing their interest in seeing a fix with "how can you consider this to be deadly when many more people die from many other things related to vehicles?"
Personally I think there's more value in fixing the dumbshit accessories nobody needs which are a recurring cause of relatively small numbers of injuries and death than focusing on many accidents attributable to discrete random errors and deciding we're all powerless to change a thing, and I think dumbshit accessories nobody needs are a more easily corrected problem than need for motorised transport or humans (and AI) are not infallible. Evidently your mileage varies.
Ford has had issues with some models sold to law enforcement due to CO leaks - some people believe it's endemic to all Explorers - and no one has died as far as I know yet.
If we can save lives by installing a simple alarm that goes off when the key is out of range, why shouldn't it be done? The cost per vehicle are negligible, no new hardware needed, just updated software.
I learned to drive in a manual transmission truck made in 1987, with a clutch interlock. But I bought an '87 car with a manual transmission last year, and to my surprise, it doesn't have a clutch interlock. So I have inadvertently started it in gear once or twice.
As it happens, I also have a 2016 car with a manual transmission and it is keyless - I haven't had any problems with it.
> Despite years of deaths, regulatory action has lagged.
In California at least, all new homes and all rentals are required to have CO detectors. It seems like that would be a good regulation to have nationwide, which would help with this problem as well as other CO related issues.
I believe the parent poster was referred to the keyless start feature only, not shutting down during regular driving.
But if keyless start isn't available (and gives a warning message) when the ambient CO levels are borderline hazardous ... isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Now that you mention it, it would be nice to get a warning light during driving as well. Or better yet a PPM reading.
On a side note, it's a legal requirement in some countries to having a working CO detector in the home, certainly for rented properties in the UK. Also in some (30+) states by the looks of it [1]. A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.
>A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.
True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.
By comparison, despite decades of passing laws and funding public education campaigns, only 33% of households ("occupied units") having a working CO detectors[1], and 40% of "working" detectors failed to alarm in hazardous levels[2]. So overall, just 20% of households have adequate CO protection.
FTA:
> From news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records and incidents tracked by advocacy groups, The Times has identified 28 deaths and 45 injuries since 2006, but the figures could be higher.
Let's estimate they found 1/3 of all cases, for a total of 56 deaths and 135 injuries. Estimating $6m per statistical life and $3m per injury (some injuries, like brain injuries, can be more than $6m for lifetime medical care and lost productivity, but this estimate is intentionally conservative). That's $61.75m annually, compared to the average of 13,532,750 annual vehicles sold in that time period[3], so about $4.5 of harm reduced per vehicle.
So economically it seems like a wash, and it prevents awful tragedies. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Note that the scarily high 40% failure is heavily biased by people keeping units long past their design lifespan. If you have a 5 year old Carbon Monoxide detector, buy a new one.
The failures prior to 5 years in that test are disturbing, but they're not statistically significant on their own so it's hard to be sure how serious that would be in practice.
>True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.
It's a trade-off, like everything else.
That those $5/$10/$50/$100 components add 10x their cost to the vehicle in terms of R&D, testing, supply chain, warrenty claims, etc. All that gets passed down to consumers. Increasing cost increases replacement interval and increases the age of the average vehicle. The result is that incremental progress that improves safety takes longer to trickle down through the market.
Possible? Trivially. Doable? Not really, because cost margins are tight on cars. Remember, you're talking about the industry that once viewed it as cheaper to pay out lawsuits than to fix a dangerous fuel tank.
If it were a FMVSS requirement, it would solve the Prisoner's Dilemma of the manufacturers. All vehicles would get more expensive by Z dollars (where Z * annual_vehicles_sold < annual_harm_reduced, in the non-futile case).
Everyone should have a CO detector in their homes and it's already law in some countries. CO poisoning is very dangerous and can happen independent of cars. IF you have a smoke alarm at home there's no reason why you shouldn't have a CO detector as well (those probably make even more sense, CO can kill you even if you're awake, smoke detectors mostly help when you're sleeping).
I feel like I read sometime last year 'DannyBee saying that modern cars were efficient enough that it was unlikely they'd be dangerous running in a garage.
Yeah, when I first got the car I have now I had trouble telling whether it was running because it was so quiet. It also has engine noise piped through the speakers, I guess to make it feel sportier.
This was my problem when I rented a keyless car for the first time last year. To preface, it was a v6 mustang which I wasn't actually expecting to be quiet, but in comparison to what I'm used to it was practically silent.
Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in? With a key you can reach under the wheel and verify what state the car's in, in under a second. I haven't seen a keyless car system that was anywhere near that intuitive. Engine noise is usually the best indicator but as you've mentioned, cars are quiet now.
With the rental car it took me a good half hour to figure out all the nuances of the keyless ignition. Compare that to seconds, occasionally minutes, of getting used to "normal" cars with keys/fobs.
> Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in?
Glance at the tachometer, if it’s at zero, engine isn’t running.
Air quality sensors that would detect this any many other potential hazards would likely cost $5 or less. Even if lawsuits resolve this issue its interesting to see how its only resolved post harm.
I'd rather see people install CO detectors within their homes as it is a more general solution to this problem. CO poisoning can occur with any fuel burning appliance in your home. It would be better to cover all sources instead of each one individually.
This would never happen in the UK or Norway as petrol costs too much and people just would not have a house big enough that they would not notice an automobile engine chugging away right next to them.
Cheap petrol in the USA means that people are in the habit of doing things like starting their car remotely to 'warm up' or 'cool down' before they then have a shower, brekkie and what not before finally getting in their car. Usually the car is on the driveway and not the garage in these scenarios, however, that is something that would not happen in the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
Given that people do suicide themselves by connecting some hosepipe from the exhaust to the interior of a car I am actually surprised that there are not rules regarding CO detectors already. CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning. This happened a few times with police cars last year and 3/4 of all CO deaths are due to vehicles, not central heating or other sources.
There are many stories, Google 'carbon monoxide police ford explorer' to start. Holes drilled in the vehicle for the flashing lights and other accessories were given as the cause in those police incidents, of which I think there were a few.
> the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
This contributes nothing to European gas prices. You can convert all the dollars you want with fees of 1% or less. European gas costs more than double the price of American gas. You're paying high prices because your gas is taxed heavily, not because oil is denominated in dollars.
I would bet that collectively the time wasted due to mishaps exceeds time saved by this feature. For me personally, I don’t think I will ever make the time up in my lifetime - I have accidentally killed a battery once because the car was in ACC mode and I didn’t realize it, and another time I drove away without the key because I was dropping the owner of the car off at the airport.
These problems are not as bad with an electric car like a Tesla. I have left AC on but the battery was fine. I have been dropped off while the driver had no key, and it posed a slight issue once they stopped the car and got off the seat. Obviously, no CO poisoning.
I always thought all cars had alarms for these cases. Similar to when your child throws the key out of the window while driving. Shouldn't happen but has happened (there were some news stories on that last year) and there's no reason the car shouldn't give an alarm.
I had a pretty scary run in with CO from my car once and it had nothing to do with the keyless fob. My car with gasoline direct injection had two bad injectors fail while I was driving home. It went into limp mode. When I got home I inserted the OBD2 scanner to diagnose the issue in the garage. Because it was in limp mode, the engine was running rich and I guess producing a lot of CO in my garage. In the roughly 5 minutes it took me to start the car, get the code, and shut it off, it had produced a dangerous level of CO. I left the garage and went inside. About 30 minutes later while I was in bed my Nest smoke/CO detectors alerted me to CO in the hallway connecting my house to the garage. I ventilated the entire house and garage and the alarm stopped. I did get a light headache from the short exposure.
Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.
If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don’t need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.
Yep, that's my rule even with properly-running engines: The car won't start until the garage door is open.
If I could hack up some sort of ignition interlock such that an Arduino or Pi could broadcast a killswitch signal while the garage door is closed, I could more effectively enforce that rule.
If the car is turned on and in range of your home WiFi, it makes sure the door is open. This is mostly a convenience thing (when I leave home in the morning, it opens the door when I start the car and closes it after I leave, same process returning home) but it also address the concerns floated in the article.
Attached garages are really a terrible misfeature, which will be emblematic for future generations (as they already are for those overseas) of our poor taste and judgement. No matter how ugly the house, it would be a lot more pleasant without the garage. In addition to the dangers cited here, garages make houses less effective at their primary purposes: controlling the movement of air, moisture, and heat. The garage door itself is a big part of that, since every time it opens and closes it opens the house completely to the outdoors. Automobiles bring moisture, dirt, heat, and noxious chemicals into the garage and thence into the house. I've never rented a house and been sorry there was no attached garage. If I ever build my own house it won't have one either.
I completely disagree with you. It's an enormous convenience in poor weather, with very minor risks that are easily mitigated (I can't believe there is anyone that doesn't have a CO detector and smoke detector at least on every floor, it should be illegal not to have them) and they can be very easily insulated. I have had both and I'd never have a place without a garage or carport.
Many places in North America, it is forbidden to park a car on your property in front of your house except on a driveway leading to a garage. The result — unsurprising to anyone except an urban ‘planner’ — is houses whose face is almost entirely garage.
Huh, interesting. I've never actually known this. I live in an extremely rural area (300 people population, only ever lived in a larger city curing college) and it's pretty common for cars to be parked wherever (one of mine has been parked in the lawn diagonally for sale.) Never made the connection.
I live in a house with an attached garage. Opening the garage door does NOT leave the rest of the house exposed to the outdoors, as there's a door which leads to the inside of the house (and it's the same construction as the front door).
Secondly, it's about a 50/50 chance in our neighborhood that the garage will be used to store vehicles. The other half of the time I've seen garages used for general storage, or for a workshop of some kind (my girlfriend has a ton of wood working equipment in the garage).
You're speaking in some kind of holier-than-thou tone of voice, I don't think you're seeing the full picture here. Do you have a car? Do you live in an area that gets bad weather from time to time? Do you even own a house?
> The garage door itself is a big part of that, since every time it opens and closes it opens the house completely to the outdoors. Automobiles bring moisture, dirt, heat, and noxious chemicals into the garage and thence into the house.
...Are you aware that there's a door between a house and its attached garage, much like the one between the front of the house and the street outside?
Your description sounds like you think garage doors open directly onto the living room.
No, I've lived in, remodeled, repaired, and torn down houses with attached garages. It's possible to build them so that the house in general will have problems before the garage starts causing its own problems. It's common not to build them so.
Also I never had an attached garage when I lived in Boston, Denver, and in the Colorado Rockies, so I'm not so sympathetic to this "oh, it's cold!" argument.
It is a little tricky to get right. For instance, it shouldn’t trip if the car is in motion.
Even harder to get right (and very likely to increase the current, extremely low accidental CO death toll), it definitely shouldn’t trip if the car is stuck in stop-and-go traffic in a tunnel full of idling cars.
I think we're talking higher numbers than is possible in a tunnel. If there was as much CO in the air there that it would trip CO detectors, it wouldn't be safe for people to use.
I will never cease to be amazed how relatively orderly that evacuation was. Only two people died in that evacuation and that was due to a car crash. I think it's great evidence that, when the going gets really tough, people band together and try to do the right thing.
The car's going to make a very small amount of CO in those fifteen seconds. If you take 'never' as 100% absolute then it's going to really distort your numbers, if your goal is counting how many people aren't aware of and safe around the danger.
The reason these sort of rules are absolute "never" are not because you'll end up with dangerous amounts of CO in 10 seconds, but because it makes it a simple rule to follow. Is 10 seconds OK? 15? 30? When does it stop being OK? Following an absolute rule eliminates much of the grey area where mistakes are made.
What if you open the door but the remote doesn't work? Then you go back inside and look for new batteries, meanwhile the car keeps running. Those cases will be rare but can occur. And switching on the car once the door is open costs at most 2 seconds.
It's interesting to see what some people consider "common" knowledge. Or maybe how common "common" is.
I grew up in Florida's coastal area where houses are built on stilts (this is to spare the house in case of hurricanes and flooding). People live upstairs and the downstairs areas are largely empty. The empty space underneath the house is where people park their cars. This means when I was growing up and learning how to drive garages aren't a thing. No one told me about running a car in a garage. Later on, all the places I lived in did not have garages either. It's only in the last few years that I actually had a garage.
Did I know about running cars in a garage is a bad idea? I had a vague notion from pop culture and stories of people gassing themselves as a form of suicide (hello "Office Space"!). I had no idea how long is "too long".
More over, I've been parking my car inside the garage and then shutting the car off as my garage door comes down or slightly after (I sort of have to because the car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work when the car is off). I did this for a couple of years and nothing has happened. This lulled me into a false sense of security.
Maybe this is a more ingrained into the majority of people's heads because they grew up with garages but that's never the case where I grew up.
I would say you took a pretty big risk running a car for 5 minutes in a closed space. I've started a car briefly in a closed garage, but we're talking for maybe 10-15 seconds (post oil-change in the winter). Even then I started to wonder if I was taking too big a risk.
Yeah I didn't know better and was lulled into a false sense of security. For a couple of years, I always started my car first and opened the garage door and always shut the car off after the door came down. Why? Because my car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work with the car off. This hasn't been an issue for a long time and after a while I figured "a few minutes is okay". Also, I didn't grow up in a place with garages (coastal part of Florida) Gas heating is really not a thing there either (again because Florida). So CO poisoning wasn't a thing I learned to worry about. So the combination of ignorance and "it was okay if I ran the car inside for 15 seconds so it must be okay if I ran it a little longer".
Dumb for sure but thankfully I did know enough about gas water heaters and gas stoves to have CO detectors installed throughout my house.
A 2L engine uses 1L of air every cycle. At 1000 rpm, that's 500L (or .5 m^3) of air every minute.
A single car garage is 4m x 2m x 3m or 24 m^3. Running the car for 5 minutes just exchanged ~10% of the air for exhaust.
I'm sure my math is wrong somewhere and someone will come by to mention it's the CO concentration, not the % of air consumed (which is true), but it's interesting math none the less.
Yeah it was pretty dumb but I grew up in the coastal parts of Florida. People there don't usually have enclosed garages and gas heating really isn't a thing. CO poisoning isn't something I really learned about growing up. I only knew of it via pop culture (i.e. "Office Space").
There are certainly a large list of reasons a car should be automatically shutting off without the keys present, but I feel it's also important to put the article and the figures they use into perspective.
Check out the GM Ignition issues where the cars lose electrical power because the key ignition moves out of the "on" position. The owners own key ring adding additional weight increasing the chance of this happening. This literally created the opposite problem... Keyed ignitions causing accidents.
We are so used to vehicles that it's so easy to forget that they are large and heavy machines. Just driving the car to work every day puts you at risk.
The article reads like... complaining about the rain while a tornado is heading your way.
Anyhow. Don't get me wrong... getting out of your car with your keys should certainly make the car yell at you and then automatically shut itself off after a period of time. With the option for the user to manually turn these things off of course. (I am a firm believer that one should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot if they explicitly go out of their way to make it possible). I am just a bit irritated at the article. :)
I really don't think the article is saying much more than you do.
A simple, silly, trvially fixable design oversight caused a number of deaths when the product became common enough. The only way to nudge the manufacturers to fix it is by raising awareness, which is what the article does - which would, hopefully, lead to proper regulation.
Additionally, we can only expect the number of accidents like this to rise as the number of newer cars increases. This article is also a PSA.
While a lot of people die in car accidents, I see it as an orthogonal issue. Using your analogy, it's like complaining about floods in TX while there's a tornado in KS heading North.
Has anyone compared the rates of carbon monoxide poisoning with and without keyless ignition? I could actually see an argument for keyless being safer: if people can leave a car and completely forget to turn it off, they can certainly do that and forget to take the keys with them. At least with the keyless ignition you have the _possibility_ of being alerted to your mistake (my Toyota beeps so loud that it would be pretty much impossible to ignore).
I assume people start their cars to warm the cabin. I expect there are much more efficient ways to warm the cabin than using excess heat from an internal combustion engine under the hood. Perhaps the solution is to provide a way to warm the cabin (including seats and steering wheel) very rapidly when the car starts, or provide a way to warm the cabin without starting the engine.
The latter solution requires an energy source. Perhaps a hybrid car's batteries are it - not an option until recently, but hybrids are now relatively common - and the energy could be used efficiently: Ambient air heaters, of course; plus heaters directly in seats and steering wheel to warm them more efficiently than the ambient air would; plus of course sensors to shut down heaters when things are sufficiently warm.
OT: Did the NY Times change their layout recently? For the first time, IMHO, it's gone from functional to appealing.
This was one thing I really liked about driving an electric car in the winter - you can start the heater remotely through the app. Since it's an electric heater it warms up way faster than ICE. If it's plugged in, it will not even drain the battery.
My old diesel car had an electric heater for the cabin. (The engine just didn't produce enough waste heat, I assume. In winter, the bonnet would still be icy after a 20 minute drive.) Such a great feature! The heater didn't start until the engine was running, or anything clever - it was a late 90s design, so nothing fancy - but you'd still get noticeably hot air within 2 minutes of setting off, and, with controls set appropriately, the cabin would become uncomfortably hot and dry, like a sauna, after about 5 minutes.
I've got a petrol car now, a later model of the same line, and the designers clearly decided that there was no need for any trickery, and they could just use the heat from the engine. Big mistake! It's absolutely rubbish by comparison.
I think this is actually a stronger argument for sealing the garage off from the house, detached if possible. There are any number of bad things being stored in many garages that make it useful to seal your garage well away from the house.
I suspect if they looked at attached garages and their toll when cars are left running the incident will be higher. How many people have died because of attached garages? Folks can help mitigate this by having carbon monoxide detectors in their garage and in the house. Car manufactures tho should have this built in, if the car is not running and the CO level inside get's too high, shut it off and sound the car alarm. The only challenge is that CO sensors seems to need replacing more than the life of the car and of course the price of car will go up and those without the need will be upset.
I wonder how many people died because they locked their keys in a running vehicle in the garage, called a locksmith, but didn’t think about CO entering the house while they waited.
At the rate of 2 per 100’s of millions of people per year, these scenarios become plausible.
While tragic, I don't want my government protecting me from myself. I mean, where does this end? What about leaving the stove on? What about using my barbecue indoors?
There have been cases where government intervention to help may have actually been worse than that original problem, such as the rise in cases of forgetting children in rear seats on warm days after laws were written forbidding car seats in the front where parents find it harder to forget their child.
I wonder how many deaths there are per year due to remote start. A kid (or another key in your pocket) presses one button on the dongle twice, and the whole household dies.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadMore than two dozen people [have been] killed by carbon monoxide nationwide since 2006 after a keyless-ignition vehicle was inadvertently left running in a garage.
On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
"Dozens of others have been injured, some left with brain damage."
So deaths are not the whole story.
While one is certainly far more likely to die in a automobile collision, of heart disease, or cancer, I don't think it helps anyone to ignore the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Incidentally, other sources of carbon monoxide can also exist in the home, so it's a good idea to have a carbon monoxide detector there. Perhaps cars too can be outfitted with them.
[1] https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Someone-drowns-in...
I guess that sort of death goes under the “drowning” category, since the bath mitigation can kill shower-takers.
How could it be? Do you plug your drain when you shower? Are the investigators in your area too lazy to find head trauma?
Sometimes I have a slow drain and I don't fix the until it becomes slow enough to fill up substantially during my shower. If I were unconscious in the sub with the shower running, it could have enough time to fill up. This would be especially true if my fall caused the water to switch to tub mode, which sends a lot more water into the tub.
I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
> I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
Jesus Christ, I wouldn't know about college, but that seem crazy. I hope your friend got the help he needed.
It's like in 40 years a toaster or an oven keeps running if you don't disable it through your "home controlling mental device" and burn your house to the ground while you are sleeping. Oh, and you cannot opt-out of the "mental device", you have to use it like it or not.
Old people have the mental muscle to think "I have the car keys with me, therefore the engine is off" built after decades. It's a serious design flaw to not offer at least an opt-out for these people (like key not IN the car, engine shuts off).
In colder climates (e.g., further North in this State), people may leave diesel vehicles idling for hours while at work, etc., because it can be so difficult to restart them outdoors in the cold.
There's a reason people start their cars and leave them running for a while.
The deaths and injuries are utterly avoidable with decent design. Also, this is a feature that isn't prominent yet. The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off. This seems like a grossly over-complicated (and failure prone) solution in comparison to just using a key for the ignition instead. If you can do something easily with a strictly mechanical simple solution, why reinvent the wheel?
If you say so. I'm pretty sure just turning the car off if there's nobody sitting in any of the seats and the key is not in the car would be a good start.
I'm not sure why remote-start exists if it's forbidden to use it.
With the remote start system I have a passing familiarity with, if you remotely start the car and warm it up with no person and no key in the car, the car automatically shuts off fifteen minutes after it has started if someone doesn't get in with a key. Seems to be compatible the simple guidelines I mentioned.
Those people don't need to take the car key with them, but with a keyless car you don't think about the key (that's the entire point of keyless cars). The key is just one of many things in your pockets.
For animals that's different of course. But wouldn't an override be enough?
This was in the late 80s. The car wasn't running. It was a mechanical e-brake. I know a lot of cars have electronic parking brakes now, but most probably still don't.
On another note, I can't think of a single car that will let you take it out of Park without a foot on the brake, or without using an override.
It also breaks the backup mechanism for no-battery situation where you can tap the fob on where the ignition lock would be for key cars to start it up.
* Rising Carbonmonoxide levels * No weight on driver seat for 3 minutes * No driving activity for 3 minutes
The first factor alone should already prompt a shutdown though. It wouldn't even matter if the key was in the car, that might happen by accident and isn't a terribly good indicator.
It's quite possible, even likely, that more than 2 people per year would die from environmental exposure if we programmed cars to not work if the key battery dies (as a proxy for "key out of range"). (Drive out to a deserted location, shut down, enjoy the day, get back in to find a dead car key battery. You want to be able to get home rather than stay at the trailhead.)
I've left the car running while stepping into a store because someone was in the passenger seat. If I get too far, my bluetooth music stops, but the air-conditioning keeps going without the key.
The incident rate per keyless vehicle is likely an order, possibly two, of magnitude higher.
The net befit is also minimal, so if they became popular you would expect a ~hundred deaths per year for what? Do save 20$ per car because they lack CO detectors?
I suspect keyless entry systems have prevented multiple deaths of children in parking lots, but there’s no way to track that.
That’s what doesn’t make a lot of sense here before we dash off to design some sort of countermeasure - there’s either an engine running (and “modern” engines aren’t that quiet, especially in a confined space), or there should be some loud visual/auditory warning. I guess it’s possible the victims didn’t hear either?
The right question to ask is how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The difference amounts to the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders.
A dozen people is a dozen people too many.
Stopping the engine when exiting the car with a fob should be the default, as it is consistent with the old, physical key behavior - and will prevent someone from driving off with your car while you have the key (as happened to someone in the thread).
The great thing about the free market is that information spurs innovation. News stories like these make consumers aware of risks they couldn't recognize before. Now we, as informed buyers, can seek out these safety features in the products we buy.
The bottom line calculation should be total $ / death prevented. And then compare that to any of the myriad other changes or improvements possible. Like the early warning crash systems (more expensive, but probably more lives saved). Or more airbags. Or backup cameras (to prevent people getting run over). Or drowsy/alertness sensors. Or more $$ for self-driving tech that could take over if a driver becomes incapacitated (long shot and long-term but huge payoff).
One other point on the auto-shutoff is that this could lead to the deaths of children in overheated cars where the parents had no clue the car would turn off by itself. The car should either turn off immediately or not at all, imo.
Finally, why not install CO detectors on the cars and shutoff the car then? It couldn't be too sensitive, but surely could tell the difference between an enclosed space and bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I think this is a good thing.
Attention to details: stopping the engine when one exits the car with the fob is consistent with what happens when you exit the car with the key you used to start it.
Before, you had to remove the key.
Now, you have to remove the keyfob and press the off button.
That is not consistent.
Ah, but that's not quite how it works, either. There is a certain, small risk involved with being in the world, we can't offload responsibility for any small accident on to the shoulders of manufacturers. Yes, if you can show negligence, there's a case to be made, but you can't.
If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
Should we require special bathtub sensors that beep when they detects still water because hundreds of people drown in bathtubs each year?
Would've saved this guy's life. That's different.
> If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
How much do you think a switch costs?
If you told me that, for less than a dollar, I could save 50 lives, I'd do it in an instant. It's weird to me that you wouldn't.
If you really want that you could have a special "warming" mode.
On a counterpoint, 15 times more people die from lightning strikes per year than this, so are kinda going after extreme edge cases here
Why the car industry would oppose such a minor fix is beyond me. If it does not even hurt the bottom line, why not make that change.
I’m sure there’s others.
If you try and lock the car while it is on (using the keyless entry), it will just produce a continuous audible noise and won’t lock - again pretty hard to miss. The same thing happens if you try and lock a key in the vehicle.
I have to get a Faraday cage now.
[1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02...
Also, obviously not nearly as dangerous given that it shuts off the engine when it is idle, on or not.
the number of deaths and injuries per year from carbon monoxide poisoning by car is roughly on par with lightning strikes. we address that particular danger with a relatively straightforward technology, the lightning rod.
so i'd expect the response here would be of similar magnitude (rather than some convoluted rube goldbergian contraption). the auto-shutoff mechanism seems to fit the bill and some cars are already fitted with it.
so all in all, it's worth being aware of this danger and the solution, but not worth spending much more time thinking about it. it's much more fruitful to focus on reducing one's heart disease vectors, cancer risks and distracted driving.
[0] https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities
Any time someone says a huge class of deaths is totally avoidable, take it with a mountain of salt. It's a useless idea, completely disconnected from the useful realm of risk management.
- Be very profitable for people we don't like.
- Employ carpenters building prefab housing in Maine rather than carpenters who live in the city.
- Fail to destroy capitalism.
- Destroy the character of the neighbourhood by casting shadows.
- Let the wrong sort of people into people's neighbourhoods.
And where would everyone park?
/s
Pretty much all of those 35000 deaths involve mistakes, faults or cases of pure bad luck whose individual contribution to fatalities is comparatively small; pretty much all of them get investigated to see what went wrong and whether it's something that's likely to be repeated or something which can be avoided in future without disproportionate cost.
Personally I think there's more value in fixing the dumbshit accessories nobody needs which are a recurring cause of relatively small numbers of injuries and death than focusing on many accidents attributable to discrete random errors and deciding we're all powerless to change a thing, and I think dumbshit accessories nobody needs are a more easily corrected problem than need for motorised transport or humans (and AI) are not infallible. Evidently your mileage varies.
Austin PD put CO detectors in their vehicles and found enough issues to pull them all off the street. http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/14/autos/ford-carbon-monoxide/i...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/01/25/feds-pr...
As it happens, I also have a 2016 car with a manual transmission and it is keyless - I haven't had any problems with it.
In California at least, all new homes and all rentals are required to have CO detectors. It seems like that would be a good regulation to have nationwide, which would help with this problem as well as other CO related issues.
There's indubitably a bunch of reasons not to do it that way...
But if keyless start isn't available (and gives a warning message) when the ambient CO levels are borderline hazardous ... isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Now that you mention it, it would be nice to get a warning light during driving as well. Or better yet a PPM reading.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...
True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.
By comparison, despite decades of passing laws and funding public education campaigns, only 33% of households ("occupied units") having a working CO detectors[1], and 40% of "working" detectors failed to alarm in hazardous levels[2]. So overall, just 20% of households have adequate CO protection.
FTA:
> From news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records and incidents tracked by advocacy groups, The Times has identified 28 deaths and 45 injuries since 2006, but the figures could be higher.
Let's estimate they found 1/3 of all cases, for a total of 56 deaths and 135 injuries. Estimating $6m per statistical life and $3m per injury (some injuries, like brain injuries, can be more than $6m for lifetime medical care and lost productivity, but this estimate is intentionally conservative). That's $61.75m annually, compared to the average of 13,532,750 annual vehicles sold in that time period[3], so about $4.5 of harm reduced per vehicle.
So economically it seems like a wash, and it prevents awful tragedies. Sounds like a good idea to me.
[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf, pp14
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222366/
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983/us-vehicle-sales-...
The failures prior to 5 years in that test are disturbing, but they're not statistically significant on their own so it's hard to be sure how serious that would be in practice.
It's a trade-off, like everything else.
That those $5/$10/$50/$100 components add 10x their cost to the vehicle in terms of R&D, testing, supply chain, warrenty claims, etc. All that gets passed down to consumers. Increasing cost increases replacement interval and increases the age of the average vehicle. The result is that incremental progress that improves safety takes longer to trickle down through the market.
Found it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705990
My car beeps at me pretty loudly when I get out with the engine running.
LOL! What kind of car is it?
Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in? With a key you can reach under the wheel and verify what state the car's in, in under a second. I haven't seen a keyless car system that was anywhere near that intuitive. Engine noise is usually the best indicator but as you've mentioned, cars are quiet now.
With the rental car it took me a good half hour to figure out all the nuances of the keyless ignition. Compare that to seconds, occasionally minutes, of getting used to "normal" cars with keys/fobs.
Glance at the tachometer, if it’s at zero, engine isn’t running.
Cheap petrol in the USA means that people are in the habit of doing things like starting their car remotely to 'warm up' or 'cool down' before they then have a shower, brekkie and what not before finally getting in their car. Usually the car is on the driveway and not the garage in these scenarios, however, that is something that would not happen in the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
Given that people do suicide themselves by connecting some hosepipe from the exhaust to the interior of a car I am actually surprised that there are not rules regarding CO detectors already. CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning. This happened a few times with police cars last year and 3/4 of all CO deaths are due to vehicles, not central heating or other sources.
Do you have a source for this? I would be interested in reading about it.
This contributes nothing to European gas prices. You can convert all the dollars you want with fees of 1% or less. European gas costs more than double the price of American gas. You're paying high prices because your gas is taxed heavily, not because oil is denominated in dollars.
Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.
If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don’t need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.
If I could hack up some sort of ignition interlock such that an Arduino or Pi could broadcast a killswitch signal while the garage door is closed, I could more effectively enforce that rule.
If the car is turned on and in range of your home WiFi, it makes sure the door is open. This is mostly a convenience thing (when I leave home in the morning, it opens the door when I start the car and closes it after I leave, same process returning home) but it also address the concerns floated in the article.
Speaking from experience here.
Also, as of 2011-ish, CO detectors are required by law in CA if you have an attached garage, a fireplace, or gas heat.
Secondly, it's about a 50/50 chance in our neighborhood that the garage will be used to store vehicles. The other half of the time I've seen garages used for general storage, or for a workshop of some kind (my girlfriend has a ton of wood working equipment in the garage).
...Are you aware that there's a door between a house and its attached garage, much like the one between the front of the house and the street outside?
Your description sounds like you think garage doors open directly onto the living room.
Also I never had an attached garage when I lived in Boston, Denver, and in the Colorado Rockies, so I'm not so sympathetic to this "oh, it's cold!" argument.
You could have saved a lot of time if you'd said that in the first place.
Even harder to get right (and very likely to increase the current, extremely low accidental CO death toll), it definitely shouldn’t trip if the car is stuck in stop-and-go traffic in a tunnel full of idling cars.
And if the car has not moved in say, 15 minutes, then shut it off (but allow it to be restarted - no lockout).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo
The craziness starts about 30 seconds in.
Are you implying this is not common knowledge?
No plan is perfect. But opening the door a few seconds before is essentially equal in danger to opening it a few seconds after.
I grew up in Florida's coastal area where houses are built on stilts (this is to spare the house in case of hurricanes and flooding). People live upstairs and the downstairs areas are largely empty. The empty space underneath the house is where people park their cars. This means when I was growing up and learning how to drive garages aren't a thing. No one told me about running a car in a garage. Later on, all the places I lived in did not have garages either. It's only in the last few years that I actually had a garage.
Did I know about running cars in a garage is a bad idea? I had a vague notion from pop culture and stories of people gassing themselves as a form of suicide (hello "Office Space"!). I had no idea how long is "too long".
More over, I've been parking my car inside the garage and then shutting the car off as my garage door comes down or slightly after (I sort of have to because the car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work when the car is off). I did this for a couple of years and nothing has happened. This lulled me into a false sense of security.
Maybe this is a more ingrained into the majority of people's heads because they grew up with garages but that's never the case where I grew up.
5 minutes is a long time!
Dumb for sure but thankfully I did know enough about gas water heaters and gas stoves to have CO detectors installed throughout my house.
A 2L engine uses 1L of air every cycle. At 1000 rpm, that's 500L (or .5 m^3) of air every minute.
A single car garage is 4m x 2m x 3m or 24 m^3. Running the car for 5 minutes just exchanged ~10% of the air for exhaust.
I'm sure my math is wrong somewhere and someone will come by to mention it's the CO concentration, not the % of air consumed (which is true), but it's interesting math none the less.
Check out the GM Ignition issues where the cars lose electrical power because the key ignition moves out of the "on" position. The owners own key ring adding additional weight increasing the chance of this happening. This literally created the opposite problem... Keyed ignitions causing accidents.
We are so used to vehicles that it's so easy to forget that they are large and heavy machines. Just driving the car to work every day puts you at risk.
The article reads like... complaining about the rain while a tornado is heading your way.
Anyhow. Don't get me wrong... getting out of your car with your keys should certainly make the car yell at you and then automatically shut itself off after a period of time. With the option for the user to manually turn these things off of course. (I am a firm believer that one should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot if they explicitly go out of their way to make it possible). I am just a bit irritated at the article. :)
A simple, silly, trvially fixable design oversight caused a number of deaths when the product became common enough. The only way to nudge the manufacturers to fix it is by raising awareness, which is what the article does - which would, hopefully, lead to proper regulation.
Additionally, we can only expect the number of accidents like this to rise as the number of newer cars increases. This article is also a PSA.
While a lot of people die in car accidents, I see it as an orthogonal issue. Using your analogy, it's like complaining about floods in TX while there's a tornado in KS heading North.
The latter solution requires an energy source. Perhaps a hybrid car's batteries are it - not an option until recently, but hybrids are now relatively common - and the energy could be used efficiently: Ambient air heaters, of course; plus heaters directly in seats and steering wheel to warm them more efficiently than the ambient air would; plus of course sensors to shut down heaters when things are sufficiently warm.
OT: Did the NY Times change their layout recently? For the first time, IMHO, it's gone from functional to appealing.
I've got a petrol car now, a later model of the same line, and the designers clearly decided that there was no need for any trickery, and they could just use the heat from the engine. Big mistake! It's absolutely rubbish by comparison.
At the rate of 2 per 100’s of millions of people per year, these scenarios become plausible.
There have been cases where government intervention to help may have actually been worse than that original problem, such as the rise in cases of forgetting children in rear seats on warm days after laws were written forbidding car seats in the front where parents find it harder to forget their child.